Baking Homemade Bread

[Axel Slingerland]

What is instant pizza dough, @Axel Slingerland ? Is it a mix (like biscuit mix), or something you buy already prepared, like the pie crust that just lay out in the pan ?

I tried the Boboli method once and it reminded me of Costco Pizza. A piece of cardboard with pizza toppings. Ewww. That's what I refer to as EMO Pizza. (EMergencies Only Pizza.) My blood glucose has tanked in Costco several times in the last 25 years, and a slice of that helps, even if it is greasy as hell and has no flavor to speak of.

There's mixes available, but what works best for me is Pillsbury Pizza Crust. It's not really "instant", but it's better for my skill set. (Which is almost non-existent.)

It's $3.64 at Walmart, and it is about the same as making Grands Biscuits. Which for me is a good thing. Cindy whipped up great pizza dough with imported Italian flour. I have no such ability.

I tried some of the Walmart "just add water" mixes and they were ok, but too much hassle. Me and stirring don't mix. Pun intended...

If you decide to use Cindy’s bread machine, here is the simple recipe that Copilot gave me, and it is super easy to do (or I would not even be attempting it).

Thanks... I might try that after I see the Pain Management Doc I made an appointment with yesterday. He is rated as the best in Kern County three years running. The guy I've been seeing... is Not. I miss my old Doc in Eureka. He was the best Doc I had in the 15 years I've been getting Occipital Nerve Blocks.

 

[Jacob Petersheim]

I tried the Boboli method once and it reminded me of Costco Pizza. A piece of cardboard with pizza toppings. Ewww. That's what I refer to as EMO Pizza. (EMergencies Only Pizza.)

When I grew up, pizza was just an occasional treat that came from box, like the old Chef Boyardee kits.

In college I had a little grant money for a while. I splurged and ordered a "Dominos" thing and by comparison it was amazing. Not that I blew money on fast food. I can recall buying my first BK Whopper once but that was the only other thing in two years.

Much later, with regular employment, I came to know better pizza. From restaurant fare to long-standing family Italian-American places of high local reputation.

More recently I bought a couple of the updated "box mix" pizzas, and even separate bagged crust mix and canned sauce. No luck with those I have to admit. I've also tried the premade crusts. Some beat frozen, but not by much.

In the last few years with a lot of dietary restraint pizza isn't on the menu.

Sometimes I will take a piece of whole wheat toast, butter it, spread on tomato paste, sprinkle some herbs, add a slice of cheese and maybe a few pickled jalapeno slices, microwave briefly to warm the tomato and begin to melt the cheese. Then I call it good, and considering everything... it tastes pretty good to me today.

 

[Yvonne Smith]

I remember that pizza dough now that you mention it, @Axel Slingerland ! ! I got some at Walmart some time ago, and it actually worked great. It just fit in my pan and make a good sized pizza for us and was a perfectly fine pizza crust, as I remember now.
I am one of those people who cooks so we will have food to eat, and not because I have a joy of cooking food; so as far as I am concerned, ANY workable shortcuts are an excellent thing. As opposed to people like Beth and John, who bake stuff because they love to bake gourmet foods, and have all the expensive kitchen equipment.

My daughter has the Le Creuset cookware and Henckel knives and other expensive cookware; which is why I think her bread machine will probably have proper English directions (and hopefully still be easy to use).
Then, I will rehome this bread machine. It actually made great bread, but I am not sure I would ever get beyond using the default setting because of how hard it is to understand the manual with the instructions translated from Chinese into weird English, and the actual meaning lost.

Someone who knows more about making bread would probably not even need the manual to know how to set everything, but that is NOT me. I grew up in a home that had no 220 receptacles, so we only had meals that could be made in my mom’s electric frying pan, or in the slow cooker, and never learned a thing about baking, or making very complicated food.
No stove, no washer/dryer.
Heated with a single old oil stove in the front room, and that was the only place in the house that was even a little warm in the winter time.
But we went camping on the weekends in the summer, so I do know how to build a campfire and cook over one, if that counts for anything…..

 

[Axel Slingerland]

When I grew up, pizza was just an occasional treat that came from box, like the old Chef Boyardee kits.

When I was a kid, the only pizza we ever got was Appian Way Pizza. It was essentially "instant" pizza dough mix and sauce. You had to supply your own cheese and assorted toppings.

My uncle Roy made it, and since I didn't like him, I wouldn't eat his pizza. I called it Uncle Roy Redneck Pizza. My sister told me You like bread, right? Yeah. You like cheese, right? Yeah. You like spaghetti sauce, right? Yeah. You like hamburger, right? Yeah. So you would like pizza. I was about 10 years old before I tried it, but once I did I loved it.

Years later a place called Pizza Villa opened in DeKalb, and I tried it once. The only thing I remember about it was it was swimming in grease and basically had no flavor. Come to think of it, it had a lot in common with Costco Pizza. Maybe they use the same recipe?

 

[Nancy Hart]

My mother would make pizza crust using Pillsbury Hot Roll Mix. It had yeast. Slightly sweet. They still make it, but hard to find. Used a recipe for sauce my aunt got from an Italian woman at the factory where she worked. It used sausage, never hamburger. It had thin crust, more like a pie than a traditional pizza.

She would always add a quart of home-grown canned tomatoes, so it had to boil down a long time to get thick. Made the house smell good.

 

[Axel Slingerland]

That sounds delizioso! They have that at Walmart. I'll have to try it.

But remember, a Pizza is a Pie. Just ask an Italian...

When the Moon hits your eye, like a big Pizza Pie, that's Amore...

Hey, I never said that Blues Rock is the only kind of music I like.

 

[Marie Mallory]

I remember that pizza dough now that you mention it, @Axel Slingerland ! ! I got some at Walmart some time ago, and it actually worked great. It just fit in my pan and make a good sized pizza for us and was a perfectly fine pizza crust, as I remember now.
I am one of those people who cooks so we will have food to eat, and not because I have a joy of cooking food; so as far as I am concerned, ANY workable shortcuts are an excellent thing. As opposed to people like Beth and John, who bake stuff because they love to bake gourmet foods, and have all the expensive kitchen equipment.

My daughter has the Le Creuset cookware and Henckel knives and other expensive cookware; which is why I think her bread machine will probably have proper English directions (and hopefully still be easy to use).
Then, I will rehome this bread machine. It actually made great bread, but I am not sure I would ever get beyond using the default setting because of how hard it is to understand the manual with the instructions translated from Chinese into weird English, and the actual meaning lost.

Someone who knows more about making bread would probably not even need the manual to know how to set everything, but that is NOT me. I grew up in a home that had no 220 receptacles, so we only had meals that could be made in my mom’s electric frying pan, or in the slow cooker, and never learned a thing about baking, or making very complicated food.
No stove, no washer/dryer.
Heated with a single old oil stove in the front room, and that was the only place in the house that was even a little warm in the winter time.
But we went camping on the weekends in the summer, so I do know how to build a campfire and cook over one, if that counts for anything…..

We cooked on a pat bellied stove when the lights went out. So our bread was mostly stove top pancakes. A wonderful life now that I look back, times were simpler.
When I was 13 I worked at a pizza place downtown Atlanta, [ then you could take a bus without risking your life ] and we served flaming pizzas, till I caught a womans Bee Hive hairdo on fire when I reached over to pour coffee.

 

[Axel Slingerland]

My Grandmomma had a pot belly stove. When I was 6 or 7 I would go visit her and I would beg her to let me take a bath like she did as a child. She'd pull out this big steel tub, heat some water on the stove and pour it into the tub. I was so small I could practically swim in that huge tub. At the end of a hot central Alabama day, that was heavenly...

 

[Yvonne Smith]

Even the bakery bread from stores, which probably is still a lot fresher than the regular shelf bread, has a lot of junk ingredients in it. This is from a bakery loaf of sourdough bread at Publix, which is probably one of the more health-conscious stores we have out here.
My bread just has the Bob’s Red Mill flour, which is stone-ground, no pesticides or glyphosate used when growing the wheat, real butter, sea salt, filtered water, and yeast, plus a spoon of sugar to make the yeast work.
It is not as easy to make sandwiches as the already sliced bread, but the flavor and smell is awesome.
“Bio-engineered” is the new word for meaning it was made with a GMO wheat. Plus, this is an almost $5 loaf of bread, so not a cheap loaf, and only 16 oz, not the regular size loaf of bread, which is usually around 24 oz.
My whole 5 lbs of bread flour was only $6+, and it will make us several loaves of bread.

 

[Yvonne Smith]

I have made about 3 loaves of the bread machine bread now, one of them in my daughter’s bread machine, and the other ones in my machine, which makes a little larger loaf.
Now, I am ready for the next bread experiment………… kefir sourdough bread !

What I am reading is that i can mix an equal amount of kefir and flour and let it ferment 1-2 days, and I can feed it after that and slowly build it up to a larger amount of sourdough starter, which can then be fed with just water and flour like regular sourdough, and kefir added now and then for the extra probiotics.
I have about a half cup of of each in a quart jar and will leave it sitting out for the next few days, and give it a little more food, and then it should be ready to make my first trial loaf of sourdough bread, and not using the bread machine.

 

[Yvonne Smith]

This book on making sourdough bread is free on Amazon Kindle right now, but will only be free for a day or so.

Bake with Ease Sourdough Cookbook for Beginners: A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Healthy, Homemade Artisan Breads & Pastries with All-Natural Ingredients and 100 Budget Friendly Recipes - Kindle edition by Brooks, Lauren, Brooks, Connor. Cookbooks,

Bake with Ease Sourdough Cookbook for Beginners: A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Healthy, Homemade Artisan Breads & Pastries with All-Natural Ingredients and 100 Budget Friendly Recipes - Kindle edition by Brooks, Lauren, Brooks, Connor. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC...

www.amazon.com